02 December 2013

By the catalog: Chronicle, Spring 2014.

It’s possible that it could have worked as short fiction, but there’s so little story here that 230 pages feels really, really long. It’s clear that the author has an appreciation for her subject both as a person and a poet, but the characters—including Emily, which is especially unfortunate—never make the shift from two-dimensional characters into three-dimensional people.

It’s fun, it’s smart, and despite the familiar components, it’s a solidly entertaining steampunk adventure. Most notably, it has a much stronger focus on the relationship between the girls than on any of the various romantic entanglements, and there’s a thought-provoking thread about feminism, and about cultural assumptions about gender roles: how “appropriate” conduct is defined by worldview.

Under Shifting Glass is about beginnings (birth, family, new realizations about old relationships) and endings (death, the end of friendship, the end of childhood); it’s about different kinds of families (blood, chosen, kindred spirits), about jealousy and about the realization that there is room in your heart for more than one person at a time. In another book, a convergence of so many storylines that drive the same themes home could easily feel contrived, but in this book, which celebrates connections of all sorts—Jess calls them ‘joinings’—it just...works.

Titles I want to read from the same catalog:

Always Emily, by Michaela MacColl: I wasn't a huge fan of Nobody's Secret, but I'm a sucker for all things Brontë. And really, I have to read it, because otherwise, my Wuthering Heights roundup would be INCOMPLETE.

The Falconer, by Elizabeth May: Revenge and romance in steampunk Scotland. It's the first in a trilogy (obvs, since standalone fantasies are an endangered species), but there are EVIL FAERIES. So, you know: worth a try!

Going Over, by Beth Kephart: Two crazy kids in love, separated by the Berlin Wall in 1983. Kephart's writing is so gorgeous in You Are My Only that I'll read anything by her.